harper's ferry, west virginia, john brown's raid quotes

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I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene, no longer going to Rome for a subject; the poet will sing it; the histo...rian record it; and, with the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, when at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown. Then, and not till then, we will take our revenge.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I am here to plead his cause with you. I plead not for his life, but for his character,--his immortal life; and so it becomes your... cause wholly, and is not his in the least. Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light. I see now that it was necessary that the bravest and humanest man in all the country should be hung. Perhaps he saw it himself. I almost fear that I may yet hear of his deliverance, doubting if a prolonged life, if any life, can do as much good as his death. "Misguided!" "Garrulous!" "Insane!" "Vindictive!" So ye write in your easy-chairs, and thus he wounded responds from the floor of the armory, clear as a cloudless sky, true as the voice of nature is: "No man sent me here; it was my own prompting and that of my Maker. I acknowledge no master in human form."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

What have Massachusetts and the North sent a few sane representatives to Congress for, of late years?... All their speeches put to...gether and boiled down ... do not match for manly directness and force, and for simple truth, the few casual remarks of crazy John Brown on the floor of the Harper's Ferry engine-house,--that man whom you are about to hang, to send to the other world, though not to represent you there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »